Rather than being auctioned, this original cover art to FF #84 is for sale by Mike “Romitaman” Burkey. If you have to ask for how much, you can’t afford it. Another superb example of Joe Sinnott’s finished inks over Jack Kirby’s pencil art.
The new Black Panther movie brings Sub-Mariner to the MCU screen. He apparently now has some sort of an Aztec connection. Or maybe it’s Mayan. Whatever it is, he’s nothing like the character created by Bill Everett in 1939.
By 1972 Everett had stopped drinking, and he was helping other alcoholics through his work with AA. His art was better than ever, but then tragically he died only a few months after issue #57 was published. There is some more information at this link:
https://www.cbr.com/marvel-namor-bill-everett-final-days/
A glaring oversight is there’s no mention that Everett illustrated Daredevil #1. Although he had trouble meeting the deadline, Everett’s art is as fine as anything he ever drew. He was a master of inking with a brush, as was my dear old friend Joe Sinnott.
My first exposure to “comic book art” wasn’t in comics, but from the syndicated Space Angel cartoon series on TV.
Alex Toth (pronounced with “toe”) was the artist behind Space Angel. Toth hired Doug Wildey to help produce the series, and Wildey in turn hired Toth to help him with Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest. After Quest, Toth designed H-B’s less ambitious animated series, Space Ghost.
I loved this stuff when I was a kid, and I still love it. Space Angel had a 6-page promotion in the children’s magazine Jack and Jill.
I borrowed those scans from a Facebook post by author Ken Quattro, who wrote Invisible Men, a history of Black comic book creators.
https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Men-Artists-Golden-Comics/dp/1684055865
From Captain America #3, May 1941.
A while back I took advantage of a sale on digital reprints of Atlas comics from the 1950’s. Some of the art published by Atlas is right up there with EC.
Anne van der Bijl has died at age 94. “Anne,” as in a Dutch variation of Andrew, was better known by his alias, Brother Andrew. I learned of his passing at the library in, of all things, the print edition of The Economist.
In my “born-again” period during college, I read Brother Andrew’s book God’s Smuggler. It’s his autobiographical account of taking Bibles into what were then the Communist countries of the Soviet Union.
There was also a comic book adaptation of God’s Smuggler, by Al Hartley. Somehow I missed seeing this Spire Comic at the time.
Hartley was a former Marvel artist, who had drawn Patsy Walker for Stan Lee.
The notice in The Economist missed an opportunity to point out that it was economics, not Brother Andrew’s efforts at planting copies of the Bible à la the Gideons, that contributed to the breakup the Soviet Union. The seeds of discontent grew from the public’s awareness of the worldly benefits of 1980’s secular consumerism — plentiful food, blue jeans, CD players, VCR’s, etc. China has since embraced the advantages of Capitalism, independent of Christianity or Democracy.
